Posted by Devin Parker

I didn't go to my D&D game tonight. Dr. Norman Geisler is speaking at our church tonight and tomorrow morning, and I had originally planned on going, but ultimately, Marilyn and I decided that it was going to be a really long seminar to be spending sitting in the pews (being standard church pews, they're not terribly comfortable even for an hour on Sunday morning), and our natural inertia won out and we just decided to spend some time together sitting at home (the traditional thing to say at this point is "Oh, I feel so old," but I've always been a homebody).

You know what that means: now it's time for TV Stories(tm)!

Tonight we watched a show called "Threshold," which I had seen a still ad for a month or two ago and was intrigued because it featured Peter Dinklage (Miles Finch from the movie "Elf" - "Call me an elf, one more time!") as one of the regular cast/protagonists. Turns out, it also has Brent Spiner as a bitter forensic doctor/scientist guy, which is pretty cool, and one of the characters - a spacecraft engineer - was revealed to be a sympathetically-portrayed Bible-reading Christian (he had one of those little electronic ones we sell at the bookstore). Anyway, it has an ongoing storyline (which, I'm pleased to note, seems to be the latest thing on TV) and was quite spooky. It's your basic supernatural/discovering the scary aliens-type story (also the latest thing on TV, apparently), but the way in which it was done was very reminiscent of Lovecraft/Call of Cthulhu-type stories - for those in the geek-know, it's about the closest thing I've seen to a "Delta Green" TV series since "The X-Files". Ship crewmen going insane after witnessing a fourth-dimensional alien Thing and so on. And now it seems that three of the protagonists (including the Christian engineer) have been infected with something that may be very, very bad (the same thing that killed off/made insane/deformed the ship crew)...and that was at the end of the episode!

So now I may have another show I'd like to record, raising my TV show list to four (Alias, Lost, Farscape...and now Threshold).

Just thought you'd like to know.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 28, 2005 at Friday, October 28, 2005 . You can follow any responses to this entry through the comments feed .

5 comments

I watched the first two episodes of the show, and while I wasn't incredibly hooked, I thought it was pretty cool. There were a few things that I loved about it though. First, a woman's in charge. Cool. Second, Brent Spiner. Third and most important, they cast a little person in a really cool, serious, intelligent, and dignified role. Kudoes!!!

3:58 AM

Isn't that groovy? All of those things were the reasons that I was first drawn to the show. As I said, the execution is what kept me there. There were parts which were genuinely suspenseful/scary, which very few people manage to pull off on television.

1:00 PM
Anonymous  

Have you every seen Firefly? The show only lasted one season on Fox. Recently they adapted it to film in the movie Serenity. My friend gave me the pilot and after viewing that I was hooked. I went out and bought the rest of the series on DVD. The meshing of the sci-fi and western genres was corny but that appeals to me

4:48 PM

I've wanted to see "Firefly" for quite a while now. Everything I've been told about it has been good, and I'm already a fan of Joss Whedon from watching "Angel" and "Buffy". It sounds like exactly the sort of show I'd like to see - sci-fi, spaceships, a western twist to everything, and excellent character dialogue. I've also been trying to see "Serenity", but when we last had an opportunity to go see it, the people I was going with weren't really interested.

I've also been told that the people who liked "Serenity" were those who hadn't yet seen "Firefly", so I'm hoping it'll be a good introduction to the series (when I finally do get a chance to see it).

On a related note, I noticed the other day that someone has come out with a "Serenity" roleplaying game...

6:38 PM

Kristen and her crew LOVES Firefly and had a countdown going to see Serenity. I was invited, but I had other plans, although I can't remember what they were. Anyway, I've heard great things, and they started showing episodes of Firefly on the Sci-Fi channel over the summer, and yet I still managed to somehow miss it. I need to see an episode soon before Kristen and Laura disown me!

12:36 AM

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